What I’m meaning is that the typical person posting an observation will not know about information unless it is pushed onto the observation in a light way (links to further info that follow people’s ids/comments). It’s a common idea that such information needs to be technical, but information can be many forms, it could be a chatty article about that species in that locality using deep familiarity, the more visual the better (50% images 50% text is perhaps the ideal), equally it could be an erudite taxon revision for the country, or maybe an article that starts off chatty, and puts at the end the technical talk. From an ordinary user’s point of view you would want the “accessible” ones to appear first, so a chatty one about the species concerned that puts it in context of similar ones (whether of the same genus or not, you can get lookalikes distant from a genus).
Even for technical users, typically there is a lot of information out there they are oblivious of, and they would benefit from being made aware of that too. Maybe it’s in a different language so they didn’t know about it, or maybe they looked for all the info in 2021, and some article has been published since. I find that all the time.
The reality is it’s a dismal thing contemplating creating something informative, because you can put days, weeks or even months of work into it, put it up, and no one or scarcely anyone will see it.
But if information were taxonomically linkable with geography and maybe style (e.g. technicality score), people could find information at a click concerning what they are posting or wanting to identify.
Yesterday I found out about Scamandra sumbaensis described by two authors author who last published a paper on Fulgoridae in 2020. It was described in February and I had no idea it existed till now. I had seen an image of a specimen a person had sent me in March if I remember correctly and I thought it was a new species since WAD did not update it. lol
Well, of course everyone wants something like this (including the identifiers). The question is whether iNaturalist is the right place to host it - and, more to the point, whether any of the tools it has so far developed are the right way to implement it. In another forum thread you seemed as sceptical as I am about the current implementation of Identification Tips, and it’s already well-known that the Guides are a dead-end as far as future development is concerned.
For me, the elephant in the room is curation. It’s perfectly fine for search tools like the Computer Vision or ID Summaries to be only 90% accurate (or whatever), since they’re just sorting the wheat from the chaff. The trade-off is acceptable, because the time-savings are clear and obvious. But identification guidance is a completely different matter if it’s intended to be a primary source of information for everyone on the site. When it comes to truly authoritative guidance, the buck has to stop somewhere, and that would seem to imply dedicated curation by a relatively small group of accountable people with verifiable credentials. But iNaturalist isn’t built on those sorts of principles: it’s a largely open, democratic community with equal voting rights - and who would want it any other way?
I am certain that iNaturalist would just punt on this problem if it could. In an ideal world, a well-established central repository of identification resources would already exist, so no one would have to contemplate cobbling something together from comments (or similar post hoc solutions).
Who is this “our” you are referring to? It sounds rather arrogantly dismissive. I would be very wary of the motives of anyone seeking to appoint themselves to this “taxon specialist” role you seem to have invented. I regularly post condensed summaries of primary resources as comments, but it would be disturbing to discover that someone thought I was claiming any authority to do so. I usually cite my sources, and try to make it clear when I am adding my own opinions. If pressed, I would always advise people to read the primary resources themselves and make their own minds up about how best to interpret them.
Literally anyone can write their own guidance and post it on iNaturalist in the form of comments, journal/blog posts, or guides (as well as linking to resources hosted off-site). But it’s important to understand that none of it is curated/moderated in a rigorous way (unlike, say, a peer-reviewed journal). And that’s really the whole point of iNaturalist: there’s almost no barriers to entry in any part of the site. Thus, all of the content is explicitly and deliberately crowdsourced (just like Wikipedia).
Do guides need curation? I think in reality without them someone would have to google to find out more, with a completely unknown outcome given the web is the wild west, so any iNat guides (for which I also include external guides that are links to PDFs) are not going to be in a worse situation, but a few details could make them much better than the wild west -
voting may help to put them in the right order where there are several guides; ideally collaboration would be encouraged to minimise the number of guides for any taxon-region but in reality people might have different styles (e.g. one easy to read, another technical), but still collaborate and learn from each other’s.
if all guides could be commented on, then anyone going to a guide could see the comments made about them. Hopefully any comments giving corrections would be incorporated by the author.
it’s unlikely beginners are going to be making guides, so there’s a reasonable standard to begin with by just being a guide.
iNat would present them with a disclaimer (“These are enthusiasts’ guides and may be a work in progress” etc)
Should it be iNaturalist?
I think iNaturalist is a great place to host it because it is “run” by enthusiasts, and so can organise enthusiasts’ guides (and links to formal ones too), and isn’t going to disappear like a personal endeavour does when the person passes away. More formal botanical sites would be very reluctant to host guides by enthusiasts because they require a much more controlled “pure” environment, you wouldn’t have plants of the world online hosting such a thing for example, so unless an alternative site can be suggested, then actually iNaturalist can be assumed to be the best place.
Is this a serious question? You might as well ask whether published guides require editorial oversight. Every reputable work of this nature (even popular, non-technical treatments) must go through an extensive process of independent review before it can be considered for publication. How else would it have any claim to be authoritative?
Your list of points isn’t even remotely close to what would be expected of the most basic wiki. For some sobering perspective on this, it’s worth taking a look at the Wikipedia article on its own reliability. And just to be absolutely clear: the point is not whether it’s merely possible for iNaturalist to incorporate some moderately accurate wiki-like crowdsourced guidance into its site; it’s whether any such content can be considered truly authoritative without the involvement of some form of independent review/oversight. You can’t just brush that aside with a vague disclaimer. (Or if you do, you haven’t really solved the problem).
We can send gentler reminders to amateurs to be careful on data and can also review and suggest improvements. Guides are a good may of learning but you won’t get it.
we have drafts for that. We need a button which is on by default with a humble warning present when it’s on (“this is an enthusiast’s guide, so there is room for mistakes. Cross-check data when possible and comment any mistakes you find below.”)
It is the best place. We can fight among these critics but I know that we can’t find something better.
Encourage collaboration. Multiple people (editors) can review each page.
As far as I’m aware, enthusiast guides on the web generally have no curation at all, people make a guide and upload it. But they tend to be made by knowledgable people (the act of making a guide makes people more knowledgable and aware than they already were, so once they’ve made it they’ll likely start spotting anything needing to correct in it).
What I suggested was a collaborative curation process that would improve on what’s on the web.
A really important function that isn’t understood by many people is the book function of inaturalist guides. This is especially on laptops but can be equally useful on mobile.
Here is a basic explanation of how to change the form:
Option 1: Use the iNaturalist PDF Export
If you have created a digital guide using the iNaturalist “Guides” feature, you can automatically convert it into a standard booklet layout.
Click on Guides and open the specific guide you want to print.
Look for the PDF options or “Print” feature within your guide’s dashboard.
Choose your layout preferences (such as grid or list views).
Generate and download the PDF file to print at home or send to a professional book publisher.
Option 2: Build a Custom Field Guide from a Map Area (Super useful!!)
If you want to quickly compile a book of species from a specific geographic region without making a formal guide first, you can use the interactive mapping tools.
Click the Explore button on the top left of the homepage.
Click the Map tab near the top right of the search filters.
Use the Make rectangular box or Make circular box icons on the map to highlight your target boundary.
Click the Species tab next to the observation counter to see the exact species list for that zone.
Use your browser’s print tool (Ctrl + P or Cmd + P) to save the structured species sheets as a local PDF document.
I made three total guides for spider species in the Theridiidae family but used journal post references in the guides to make one comprehensive guide of all the species I’ve covered. Using journal posts in conjunction with guides do wonders as I learned three years ago when the text wall of a description for one of my guides was looking daunting.
Compiling a guide with all known ID features and then changing it to book format and saving it as that link allows much faster field or at home identification in my personal experience.